Abstract

With the recent surge in threats to public safety, the security focus of several organizations has been moved towards enhanced intelligent screening systems. Conventional X-ray screening, which relies on the human operator is the best use of this technology, allowing for the more accurate identification of potential threats. This paper explores X-ray security imagery by introducing a novel approach that generates realistic synthesized data, which opens up the possibility of using different settings to simulate occlusion, radiopacity, varying textures, and distractors to generate cluttered scenes. The generated synthetic data is effective in the training of deep networks. It allows better generalization on training data to deal with domain adaptation in the real world. The extensive set of experiments in this paper provides evidence for the efficacy of synthetic datasets over human-annotated datasets for automated X-ray security screening. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approach for a diverse threat object dataset on mean Average Precision (mAP) of region-based detectors and classification/regression-based detectors.